How To Handle The Holiday Season Relax: So What If You’ve Only Done A Fraction Of Your Holiday Chores?

Breathe deeply. Stay calm. And don’t forget your mantra.

“I CAN be in control. I CAN be in control …”

You can do this holiday thing.

Just think how far you’ve come. You survived Halloween, although barely. You got through Thanksgiving still talking to most of your shirttail relatives. You’ve already made reservations for New Year’s. And although there are only 17 shopping days left till Christmas, you’ve got … what! … only a quarter of your shopping done?

Eeeeeeekkkkkk!

‘Tis the season of panic, a season when unrealistic expectations, limited finances and sagging energies can stomp all over a normal human psyche.

Just ask psychologists. We did. In return, Seattle shrinks shared classic cases, passed along sage seasonal advice and offered a grab-bag of sanity savers.

‘Tis the season to be (sorta) jolly.

Down and out: All that pressure to be happy (isn’t everyone?) can be really depressing. “You can muddle through all year being comparatively unhappy,” says psychologist Carol Simon Kranz. “But during the holidays, you suddenly realize that, in comparison to yourself, all the rest of the world is very happy and you’d better go see a therapist.”

Sanity saver: Get real. Maybe the Waltons were “happy, happy, happy” at holiday time. But this is the real world, and real people aren’t happy all the time, even at Christmas. Most folks are just like you - overstressed and overburdened.

Duck the malls: You’ve got too much to do, too little time. Too many people on your gift list, too little money to spend. There are too many shoppers, too few parking spaces.

Sanity saver: Simplify, simplify. Shorten gift lists, order from catalogs, stuff a basket with dried flowers from your garden, gourmet treats or candles and bath oil. It doesn’t cost a bundle and it makes people feel good.

Above all, be nice to yourself. When holiday anxieties mount, take a break. Get a massage, take a 15-minute bath, watch a funny movie. Laughter has an organic effect on you, our advisers say. It enhances the feel-good chemicals in the brain.

Ties that bind: You feel pressure to be everywhere, with everyone. Do you spend the holidays with your friends, or with family that’s badgering you to fly East again? Do you go to his folk’s house or hers? The in-laws demand to know.

Sanity saver: Make a plan, early. Advertise it. Stick to it.

If you do travel, set concrete goals ahead of time: Promise yourself not to snap at your whiny sister or regress to age 10 because your mother frowns on your hemline.

And remember, you can just say “no.”

Psychologist Bart A. Paff arms his clients with catchy phrases like: “Tune into WTFM” (otherwise known as “What’s True For Me”) and “Don’t ‘should’ on yourself or you’ll end up in a pile of guano.”

Paff says the best example of this he’s ever heard was when author/ psychologist Wayne Dyer recounted how his mother was so insistent he come home for Christmas one year that she sent him a round-trip plane ticket. He responded by exchanging it for a ticket to the Bahamas.

“Talk about empowering yourself!” Paff said.

Home alone: Singles may be out in the cold this season, since dinner and party invitations can be hard to come by.

Sanity saver: Join a hiking club, a book club, a church group, a singles group.

Fear not: Last year, everything seemed to go wrong: The relatives bickered at the dinner table and were underwhelmed by their gifts, and the kids were constantly underfoot. How much worse will it be this year?

Sanity saver: Do an end run on that fear. Practice how to handle disasters and assume the worst.

Expect that Christmas dinner with contentious Aunt Jenny will jangle your nerves, that Uncle John will drink too much, that Mom will hate your present, no matter how hard you’ve tried. Psychologist Art Peskind calls it “stress-inoculation.”

A perfect mess: You look at the beautiful holiday meal on the cover of Bon Apetit and sigh. Such perfection. Then Martha Stewart pops up on television explaining how she designed each of the jingle bells on her perfectly appointed reindeer cookies. How can you measure up?

Sanity saver: Don’t. Buy prepackaged cookies, canned yams, boneless turkey breasts. Forget the custom jingle bells.

This time of year, Seattle University psychologist Steen Halling harkens to some sage advice he once heard from a conference speaker: “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”

“It doesn’t mean flying an airplane,” Halling says. “But singing and skating - it’s OK not to do them well.” Christmas cookies, too.

Bonus sanity savers

Bag the big dinner. Volunteer at a soup kitchen instead.

Change your routine. If waiting until morning to open presents creates unbearable stress every year, try opening them on Christmas Eve.

Pick one thing you’d like to do for the holidays. Then do it. Have lunch with an old friend. Treat yourself to high tea at a fancy hotel. If nothing else goes your way, at least you’ll have one fond memory.

Dial ‘em up. Use a speaker phone to bring two households together. You can join voices in Christmas carols while giving thanks; you don’t have to fly all over the country to do it.

Escape. If holiday time with your family feels like marching off to war, make other plans - a thousand miles away.

“It’s easier to back away if you have a legitimate reason,” said therapist Renee Gilbert. Will they swallow a December business conference in Hawaii?

Shop the easy way: quick and cheap

Buy a gag gift. They don’t cost a lot, and they make you laugh.

Pass the good stuff around. Instead of buying new gifts each year, see if members of your family will agree to rotate presents they’ve already received. That pink scarf you gave Aunt Edna last year would look great on cousin Alice.

Give the gift of togetherness. Buy theater tickets and go with a relative or friend, or enroll both of you in a class. If you have a cabin, give a weekend getaway, complete with popcorn, hot chocolate and companionship.

Instead of buying presents, let kids pledge to make their parents’ bed for a week, or do the dishes, or anything else around the house they might not ordinarily do.

Mantras

When your blood pressure starts to rise, close your eyes and repeat one of the following:

“This, too, will pass.”

“Just say ‘no.”’

“I am a survivor. I’m strong. I can do this.”

“Be happy.”

“I will stay calm and realistic.”

“Relax. This is just like any other time of the year.”

Warnings from the couch

Case No. 1: Members of a large family, hoping to keep from going broke at Christmas, agreed to draw names from a hat and buy only one present. It was an unhappy experiment for one woman, whose only gift that year was a ragged sweater from a relative who would rather have thrown a pie in her face than buy her a present.

Case No. 2: Christmas dinner had always been at Aunt Mable’s. But last year, cousin Anna did the honors. It was a lovely affair - the house was beautifully decorated, the table exquisitely set, the gourmet food professionally catered.

But there was no pleasing Aunt Mable. She complained about the house, the food, anything she could think of. For heaven’s sake, she asked, where are the potato chips, the salami, the miniature hot dogs?

Anxiety aside, isn’t it still nice to …

Take a break from routine.

Make contact with other people.

See the joy in the eyes of a child.

Take a moment to count your blessings.

MEMO: The experts consulted were: Susan Burchfield, Vicky M. East, Anne Ganley, Renee Gilbert, Stephen Goldberg, Steen Halling, Carol Simon Kranz, Barry Moss, Bart A. Paff, Art Peskind and Pam Weisman.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Seattle Post-Intelligencer Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporters Cecelia Goodnow, M.L. Lyke and Lynn Steinberg contributed to this story.